Ardour 2.1 released

Ready to make music on those long nights after the clocks change up north? Ready to make music in the bright summer evenings down south? Ardour 2.1 squeaks out in time for both hemispheres to enjoy it. A few brand new features, and a heap of important bug fixes, are there to make the upgrade worth your time. Source code is available as well as the DMG for X11 on Mac OS X.

Because there will be people who did not upgrade from 2.0, the list below includes not just changes from 2.0.5, but an overview of what has changed since 2.0. I hope that Ardour subscribers and supporters are happy with the progress since the start of the summer.

NOTE: One or more of the minor GUI fixes listed below will not take effect unless you remove your ~/.ardour2/ardour2_ui.conf file.

Brand New Features not present in previous minor releases (2.0.1-2.0.5)

new import dialog

better auditioning

better presentation of options

resampling quality control

new JACK control dialog

if you don't want to use qjackctl and don't require
and external JACK patcher (i.e. "Let me just run Ardour,
dammit!") this dialog will allow you to configure JACK. It only
appears (as a tab in the new session dialog) if JACK
is not running when Ardour is started.

mouse scrubbing

switch to mouse audition mode

button1-press and drag

separate MMC device ID's for send & receive

range context menus modified for greater clarity and simplicity

crossfades involving transparent regions now work appropriately

click or drag in rulers works better

update click data when sample rate changes

provide limits to in-memory undo history depth

provide limits to saved undo history depth

optionally tie editor & mixer display order together

provide GUI control for timecode-slave-is-synced

make Ctrl-w close any dialog

generate peakfiles for embedded files asynchronously

metering now works more appropriately with no inputs

big clock is always on top

reduce memory usage during I/O from multichannel audio files

change window visibility during startup

use new translation domains, to avoid ardour 0.99 and ardour 2.X from colliding when installed in parallel

new option (only-copy-imports) to avoid creating sessions that reference external audio files (i.e. all audio is either native,
copied or hard-linked into the session)

retain MIDI control information for plugin parameters

auto-reconnect ALSA sequencer MIDI ports at startup

New Features in previous minor releases (2.0.1-2.0.5)

add Theme Manager, including new "light" theme

support for 16 bit native file format

add delta-cursor option from trunk (allows clock to display the gap between the edit+playback cursors)

massively increase automation resolution

stop audio clocks from vanishing when turned off

plugin selection dialog now has filtering by name, type, author and more

permit GUI user-driven add/remove of MIDI ports

alternate file name filters for the soundfile browser (allow user to see all files, not just guesses at audio files)

switch monitoring default to external

add declicking xfades when looping

new denormal handling options, including both DC bias and processor feature choices

Added/improved the ability to record while the transport is looping. This works for both Internal (seamless) and JACK sync, new regions are created each cycle around the loop and stacked on top of each other. It is recommended for now that automatic crossfades be turned off when doing this. Punch-In/Out may be used also.